The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Enablement of a PHY device within a computing device often involves communication between a media access controller (MAC) and the PHY device. In order for the communication to occur between the components, both the MAC and the PHY device must be communicating using the same programming construct. As no standard programming construct has been defined for communication between MACs and PHY devices, multiple different programming constructs may be utilized for communicating between MACs and PHY devices depending on the MACs and/or the PHY devices implemented.
In legacy computing devices, often the MAC and the PHY device were produced by different manufacturers who would develop the components without interaction between the manufacturers. The lack of interaction between the manufacturers would lead to the MAC and the PHY device communicating in a different programming construct from each other. In order to rectify this issue, the MAC manufacturer, the producer of the computing device and/or motherboard, and/or a third party would reprogram binary code within a driver associated with the PHY device to enable communication between the MAC and the PHY device. This approach was complicated, time consuming and costly to perform.